ABSTRACT Sarah Bas Tovim, the famous and elusive author of The Tkhine of the Gate of Unification and Tkhine of Three Gates (Sheloyshe Sheroim), has had a dramatic post-text afterlife as a myth, legend, literary fairy godmother, and, more recently, a proto-feminist and very real historical icon. Sarah’s historical slipperiness has inspired derision, reinvention, and, conversely, careful historical substantiation. While more recent scholarship has placed her as a historical person with her own subjectivity, her silences are treated as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than part of a narrative and an opportunity for renewed understanding. By placing the reader of Sarah Bas Tovim’s texts front and center, we see that Sarah’s affective personhood and simultaneous slipperiness work to form affective communities across time. Fear and embarrassment introduce the reader to Sarah’s present, constructs the borders of her new community, defines her relationship with God, while the obfuscating use of the personal pronoun fundamentally blurs the role of writer and reader in the tkhine. ” Through Sarah’s narrative representation, we are brought into close connection to her felt presence, where her unstable representations shift the idea of what it means to exist in a common community at all.‏

ABSTRACT The examination of women’s epistolary writing provides valuable insights into gender stereotypes and evolving cultural perspectives on gender-genre connections. Analyzing a writer’s correspondence can offer glimpses into the nuanced textures of lived experiences and the articulation of private thoughts, including theological, social, and cultural deliberations. Despite its potential significance, Grace Aguilar’s correspondence with Isaac D’Israeli, a renowned Jewish British writer, comprising five letters from July 1840 to July 1844, remains unexplored. This exchange serves as a delineation of Aguilar’s literary body of work, theological considerations, and reflections on the societal status of women, particularly Jewish women, in the nineteenth century. This paper addresses the existing oversight by bringing attention to and scrutinizing the literary legacy evident in Aguilar’s correspondence. Furthermore, given Aguilar’s portrayal of herself as a “youthful aspirant” seeking advice, professional guidance, and access to London’s publishers and literati from the esteemed writer Isaac D’Israeli, this study delves into the complex dynamics of the cross-gender mentor–mentee relationship between Isaac D’Israeli and Aguilar.

ABSTRACT The article presents a detailed analysis of the poetry written by Hebrew poet Elisheva (1888-1949) in Russian during the 1910s prior to her migration to Palestine. Through a deep dive into the key tropes, imagery, and motifs of her collections Minutes and Secret Songs, the article reveals Elisheva’s self-perception as a perpetual outsider and a wandering (non)Jew in search of refuge and redemption. The analysis investigates the roots of Elisheva’s persistent alienation and the forces that shaped her into an eternal wanderer, forever seeking but never finding a true home. Further, the article explores the connections between Elisheva’s poetry and Romanticism, highlighting the parallels with her complex non-Jewish identity and struggles for acceptance in both Russian and Jewish societies. By examining Elisheva’s Russian poems, the article provides insights into the evolution of her worldview and the transformation of her “otherness’ that would ultimately define her poetic voice.

ABSTRACT In this special issue of Women's Writing, Nordic women's writing is examined through the lens of religious faith. It is the first of two issues that will bring together 13 studies on various themes related to this subject. They share a focus on women's writing in the Scandinavian countries; prayers, hymns, poems, sermons and novels that reveal directly and indirectly how faith has shaped women and their role in society; and how women have made use of religion to create their own ideas, and, in some cases, found arguments for their emancipation. The articles in this issue cover material from Denmark, Iceland and Norway, while the second special issue on Nordic women and religious faith, covering the long nineteenth century, contains articles on the literature from Finland, Norway, SwedenIceland and Denmark.

ABSTRACT The article analyzes changing attitudes to women's mobility and its desirability in premodern Iceland, as reflected in the reception of the legend of St. Ursula. Medieval Old Norse-Icelandic texts are compared with Úrsúlukvæði, a post-medieval reworking of the legend. In medieval hagiography, St. Ursula is a Christian princess who, when pressured to marry a heathen suitor, leads eleven thousand virgins on a pilgrimage to Rome that ends with martyrdom in Cologne. The absence of the heathen suitor trope in Úrsúlukvæði allows Ursula to sail abroad on her own initiative, but in martyrdom she no longer becomes the triumphant leader of a powerful martyr-saint company. Whereas St. Ursula's life provides a model of a woman leader on a sacred journey, Úrsúlukvæði portrays her as an educator of women in her home community, whose ocean-crossing leads to her capture and murder. The article argues that Icelandic women enjoyed greater transatlantic mobility prior to the Reformation, as no equivalent to women's pilgrimage emerged. Emphasis was instead placed on educating girls within the domestic sphere. If hagiographic accounts of St. Ursula assure women that they can follow a spiritual path across the sea, Úrsúlukvæði reveals heightened anxiety over women's encounters with the outside world.

ABSTRACT This paper highlights Aphra Behn’s views, articulated through her translation practice and her theory of translation, that women ought to be able to enter more freely into educated discourse, and in this particular case, astronomical discussion. A Discovery of New Worlds (1688) is a translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686). Both works present a conversation where a philosopher explains his views on the heliocentric model of the Universe to a marquise. In his preface, Fontenelle claims to have made science more accessible to women, particularly through his choosing to write in French, a less exclusive language than Latin. Because of this Fontenelle is regarded by some as groundbreaking in opening scientific thought up to women. However, while Behn recognised Fontenelle’s intentions and applauded his aims, this essay explores the adjustments she made to avoid what she saw as Fontenelle’s inability to recognise women’s equal capacity for scientific learning reflected in his oversimplification of ideas. Through examination of adjustments Behn makes to the marquise’s reactions and thought processes, I will show that Behn did not only translate Fontenelle’s words but also engaged in debates about women’s access to scientific discourse.

ABSTRACT Hamish John Wood’s discovery of a 1718 publication of Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady by Mary Davys confirms my speculation that the novel was actually composed in 1716–1718, although as far as we knew, it had not been published until its inclusion in The Works of Mrs. Davys (1725). Because this earlier publication appeared pseudonymously under a different title, Love and Friendship by “little Dick Fisher”, it was well hidden in the mid-1990s when my research for the Kentucky edition of three of Davys’s novels was under way. This critical piece of evidence in Davys’s sparsely documented writing life supports the argument that novel faces backwards and forwards, between her attempts to establish herself as a political and social commentator in London after the successful performance of The Northern Heiress, and her move to Cambridge to open a coffeehouse. Pivoting between past and future, the text reflects both the satirical writing of the capital and the mature novels of her later period: it is both an unsatisfactory novel, without the usual framing devices of the epistolary form or the satisfactory conclusion of amatory fiction, and a witty political commentary that presents a weak, unsteady male Tory and a resolved, clear-eyed female Whig.